Gospel: From Problem to Promise

Paul uses a variation of this image of the all-powerful parent in Romans 8. The Spirit, he tells us, testifies that we are the children of God and, therefore, God's joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:16-17). This is a wonderful promise and was particularly wonderful in Paul's age, when a father's adoption of one of his servants into the family meant a radical change in that servant's status.

But Paul adds a condition to the promise that we will be heirs with Jesus: "if so be that we suffer with him." Being a Christian means imitating Jesus Christ. It means being willing to suffer unjustly.

As Jesus reminds us in 3 Nephi 27, Jesus came into the world to do the Father's will and for reasons we do not understand the Father willed that Jesus be crucified. If Paul is right, then his cry on the cross, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"(Mark 15:34) may sometimes be our own. Yet we, like Jesus, must continue to trust.

The Book of Mormon teaches that one reason for Jesus' death is so that "his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities" (Alma 7:12). He promises to aid us in our suffering, but he does not promise to remove that suffering any more than his own suffering was removed.

There is no answer to the question of suffering, perhaps not even for a divine being, if an answer means an explanation of its necessity or why some suffer so much more than others. But if "answer" means "response," then the gospel is the response.

The problem to which it is the response has two parts:

• We can expect to suffer in this life, often unjustly (which does not mean we should not try to mitigate suffering; in fact if we imitate Jesus we will do what we can to remove it).
• Though we are expected to do God's will, obedience is not enough to save us from divine condemnation, for ultimately no one can claim to be righteous (Psalm 14:3; Romans 3:10).

The response is to each of those problems:

• The gospel is God's promise, not that we will escape suffering, but that the Son will succor us in our suffering, as we should also succor others.
• The gospel is God's promise that through his Son we can escape divine condemnation for sin, as we should not condemn others for theirs.

As John Taylor said, as far as human salvation is concerned, that's all the truth. However else we use the word "gospel," we ought never to let that truth remain far from what we mean.